2020 FORD TRANSIT — Complaint #1881226
Open-data reference.
NHTSA Complaint about EQUIPMENT:MECHANICAL:ACCESSORY SCISSOR/SCREW/BOTTLE JACK/LIFT filed March 19, 2023
NHTSA complaint #1881226 (ODI reference 11512612) concerns a 2020 FORD TRANSIT and was filed on March 19, 2023. The owner reports the failure occurred on March 16, 2023. The report was geocoded to Illinois based on the filer's self-reported location. The affected component is categorized as equipment:mechanical:accessory scissor/screw/bottle jack/lift, one of NHTSA's standardized taxonomy codes used to group defect patterns across make, model, and year.
The filer flagged the following severity indicators: crash: no, fire: no, injuries: 0, fatalities: 0. No crash, fire, or fatality was associated with this report, which places it in the early-warning stream rather than the priority-review stream. Because a VIN was supplied, this complaint is tied to a specific vehicle and not just a model-year cohort.
Individual complaints are consumer-submitted and unverified by NHTSA engineers — the agency's role at this stage is to collect, index, and make them searchable. What matters for federal action is the pattern: when many owners of the same FORD TRANSIT cohort independently describe similar equipment:mechanical:accessory scissor/screw/bottle jack/lift failures, defect investigators have grounds to open a PE and request manufacturer data. Related filings for the same vehicle and component appear below, and the detail page for the full 2020 FORD TRANSIT shows the complete component-level complaint distribution alongside any active investigations or recalls.
Complaint Description
The bottle jack catastrophically failed while replacing a spare tire, and it is available for inspection upon request. The safety of my partner was put at risk while they were changing the tire and the van fell. Luckily the van fell on the new tire that was not quite in place yet but did hold up the van. We have used the bottle jack several times now, but it could seriously hurt somebody if it failed catastrophically like it did for us. The cupped mounting point on the jack was bent from a prior tire change; however, we were about 1 hour from town and had little choice but to use it anyways when it failed catastrophically. We got a proper heavy-duty hydraulic jack from the store to finish the tire change. The problem has not been reproduced or confirmed by anybody. The vehicle and component were not inspected by anybody.
Complaint Details
| NHTSA Complaint ID | 1881226 |
| ODI Number | 11512612 |
| Date Filed | March 19, 2023 |
| Failure Date | March 16, 2023 |
| VIN | 1FTBW3UG4LK |
Source: NHTSA Vehicle Complaints Database. Component taxonomy and severity codes are standardized by NHTSA Office of Defects Investigation.
Read our methodology — how this data is sourced, computed, and verified.